CELS VI: Half a CELS is Statistically Better Than No CELS

Northwestern's Stained Glass Windows Made Me Wonder Whether Some Kind of Regression Was Being Proposed

As promised, I’m filing a report from the Sixth Annual Empirical Studies Conference, held 11/4-11/5 at Northwestern Law School. Several of the attendees at the Conference approached me and remarked on my posts from CELS V, IV, and III. That added pressure, coupled with missing half of the conference due to an unavoidable conflict, has delayed this post substantially. Apologies! Next time, I promise to attend from the opening ceremonies until they burn the natural law figure in effigy. Next year’s conference is at Stanford. I’ll make a similar offer to the one I’ve made in the past: if the organizing committee pays my way, I promise not only to blog the whole thing, but to praise you unstintingly. Here’s an example: I didn’t observe a single technical or organization snafu at Northwestern this year. Kudos to the organizing committee: Bernie Black, Shari Diamond, and Emerson Tiller.

What I saw

I arrived Friday night in time for the poster session. A few impressions. Yun-chien Chang’s Tenancy in ‘Anticommons’? A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Co-Ownership won “best poster,” but I was drawn to David Lovis-McMahon & N.J. Schweitzer’s Substantive Justice: How the Substantive Law Shapes Perceived Fairness. Overall, the trend toward professionalization in poster display continues unabated. Even Ted Eisenberg’s poster was glossy & evidenced some post-production work — Ted’s posters at past sessions were, famously, not as civilized. Gone are the days where you could throw some powerpoint slides onto a board and talk about them over a glass of wine! That said, I’m skeptical about poster sessions generally. I would love to hear differently from folks who were there.

On Saturday, bright eyed and caffeinated, I went to a Juries panel, where I got to see three pretty cool papers. The first, by Mercer/Kadous, was about how juries are likely to react to precise/imprecise legal standards. (For a previous version, see here.) Though the work was nominally about auditing standards, it seemed generalizable to other kinds of legal rules. The basic conclusion was that imprecise standards increase the likelihood of plaintiff verdicts, but only when the underlying conduct is conservative but deviates from industry norms. By contrast, if the underlying conduct is aggressive, jurors return fewer pro-plaintiff verdicts. Unlike most such projects, the authors permitted a large number of mock juries to deliberate, which added a degree of external validity. Similarly worth reading was Lee/Waters’ work on jury verdict reporters (bottom line: reporters aren’t systematically pro-plaintiff, as the CW suggests, but they are awfully noise measures of what juries are actually doing). Finally, Hans/Reyna presented some very interesting work on the “gist” model of jury decisionmaking.

At 11:00, I had to skip a great paper by Daniel Klerman whose title was worth the price of admission alone – the Selection of Thirteenth-Century Disputes for Litigation. Instead, I went to Law and Psychology III. There, Kenworthey Bilz presented Crime, Tort, Anger, and Insult, a paper which studies how attribution & perceptions of dignitary loss mark a psychological boundary between crime and tort cases. Bilz presented several neat experiments in service of her thesis, among them a priming survey- – people primed to think about crimes complete the word “ins-” as “insult,” while people primed to think about torts complete it as “insurance.” (I think I’ve got that right – – the paper isn’t available online, and I’m drawing on two week old memories.)

At noon, Andrew Gelman gave a fantastic presentation on the visualization of empirical data. The bottom line: wordles are silly and convey no important information. Actually, Andrew didn’t say that. I just thought that coming in. What Andrew said was something more like “can’t people who produce visually interesting graphs and people who produce graphs that convey information get along?”

Finally, I was the discussant at an Experimental Panel, responding to Brooks/Stremitzer/Tontrup’s Framing Contracts:Why Loss Framing Increases Effort. Attendees witnessed my ill-fated attempt to reverse the order of my presentation on the fly, leading me to neglect the bread in the praise sandwich. This was a good teaching moment about academic norms. My substantive reaction to Framing Contracts is that it was hard to know how much the paper connected to real-world contracting behavior, since the kinds of decision tasks that the experimental subjects were asked to perform were stripped of the relational & reciprocal norms that characterize actual deals.

Dave Hoffman is the Murray Shusterman Professor of Transactional and Business Law at Temple Law School. He specializes in law and psychology, contracts, and quantitative analysis of civil procedure. He currently teaches contracts, civil procedure, corporations, and law and economics.